100% looks like an AI generated picture…
I’d recommend you get some practice identifying and proving AI generated images. I agree this has a bit of that “look”, but in this case I’m quite certain it’s just repeated image compression/a cheap camera. Here’s the major details I looked at after seeing your comment:
- The grass at the bottom left. AI is frequently sloppy with little details and straight lines, usually the ones in the background. In this case, you can look at any blade of grass and follow it, and its path makes sense. The same happens with the lines in the tiles, the water stains, etc.
- The birthmark on the large brown dog. In this case, this is a set of three photos, which gives us an easy way to spot AI. AI generated images start from random noise, so you’d never get the exact same birthmark, consistent across different angles, from a prompt like “large brown dog with white birthmark on chest”. Spotting a change in the birthmark, or a detail like it, would be a dead giveaway, but I can’t spot any.
- There are other tricks as well, such as looking for strange variations in contrast and exposure from the underlying noise, but those are more difficult to explain in text. Corridor Digital has some good videos demonstrating it with visual examples if you’re interested, but suffice to say I don’t pick up on that here either.
It’s useful to be able to prove or disprove your suspicions, as well as to be able to back them up with something as simple as “this is AI generated, just look at the grass”. Hope this helps!
Also, I’m pretty sure I saw this pic being meme long before AI images were a thing.
True, someone else did some reverse image searching before I got here, but I think it’s an important skill to develop without relying on dating the image, as that will only work for so long, and there will likely be more important things than memes that will need to be proven/disproven in the future. A reverse image search probably won’t help us with the next political scandal, for example. It’s a pretty good backup to have when it applies though, nice that it proves me correct here.
I was just pointing to the simplest answer I had, which didn’t rely on a bunch of circumstantial and vague hunches. Since you take issue with that, I guess I’ll rant a bit.
Fake photos have been a thing as long a photos have been. Very little has changed in that regard. The various tips and tricks to spot AI fakes will become obsolete a lot faster than the other critical thinking skills needed to decipher fact from fiction in any other medium: news articles, YouTube videos, social media, etc. This will be especially true as the tools used to make these images will evolve. One of those critical thinking skills is tracing a claim, especially a repeated claim, back to it’s source. Another is looking at the timeline of the spread of the meme. These both involve gathering actual evidence and work for a variety of mediums. This is why so many lamented the death of rigorous independent journalism. Suddenly the news becomes so much more trouble to trust and to verify. AI is here just a fungus feeding off the corpse of journalism in the dense jungle of the death of critical thinking in the news consuming public.
